User Satisfaction-Aware Sub-Channel Assignment in Ultra-Dense Networks with Max-Min Fairness

In ultra dense networks, interference management remains an essentially topic to alleviate the severe interference brought in by the densely deployed small cell access points. Despite the traditional spectrum resource allocation scheme to optimize network throughput under interference threshold, users' QoS satisfaction has emerged as another practical metric, which brings in new challenges for the interference management. In this paper, we model the optimization problem as a max-min fairness problem with respect to the user's QoS satisfaction rate and propose a fair interference management scheme by jointly considering the interference condition, spectral efficiency and fairness in resource allocation. Specifically, our proposed scheme decomposes the optimization problem into QoS- aware user clustering generation subproblem to find the user cluster set with maximal spectral efficiency and weighted multi-cluster resource allocation subproblem to achieve flexible and fair resource allocation among user clusters. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can flexibly adapt to the conditions with various interference levels, number of sub-channel resources and number of serving users, and achieve considerable performance in minimum user QoS satisfaction and throughput while maintaining a high level fairness among users.